the weekly thing: the underground railroad

hi, welcome to my third weekly thing. this (very hot and uncomfortable) monday afternoon i'd like to talk about a book i read for my monthly book club, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad.

if the title was any indicator, it is by no means an "easy" book, which is simultaneously its strength and weakness. given the gravitas, it demands a certain amount of terror to even remotely begin to respectfully approach the subject matter (the enslavement of the consequently African American). though it's not the cat-of-nine-tails or the brutal punishments that await captured slaves that fills the reader with dread, so much as the feeling of futility in america; if a slave were to escape, where would they even go? what could they possibly do to secure peaceful livings for themselves and any family they might have? how could they scrub away the traumatizing lives they'd lived hitherto?

should the book have ended with this trajectory, it would have remained a brutally honest teardown of the american dream. thankfully, author Colson Whitehead's vision is not without hope, though it is certainly less "biblical" as one typically finds in accounts trying to alleviate the horrors of the early american slave-trade, openly-critical of the flawed theologies of the past and the theologies forgotten today. his answer instead: the revelation of the mythical underground railroad.

though the underground railroad in reality had nothing to do with trains or subterranean tunnels, this book has everything to do with them. cavernous mouths that defy explanation, whose origins are shrouded in mystery, filled with ornately decorated stations and their charismatic and heavily symbolic conductors. at the revelation, Cora asks a stationmaster who built the fantastic roads. ominously they reply, "who builds anything in this country?" the sublimely treacherous tunnels are shifting metaphor for many things, but perhaps the most damning is revealed in this quote from the aforementioned conductor:

Cora and Caesar climbed into the [train car] and Lumbly abruptly shut them in. He peered between the gaps in the wood. "If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America." He slapped the wall of the boxcar as a signal. The train lurched forward. (p.69)

with the case for the mythic cracked open only pages before, the reader is left to interpret what the conductor meant. as Cora and co. hurtle down the tracks towards their uncertain fates, they have nothing to hold on to but each other and a hope that must defy the strength of the powers that be.

my verdict: read The Underground Railroad.